Barcelona Pavilion

View of the interior golden onyx wall, looking northwest towards the small water basin with sculpture

Creators:

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (German architect, 1886-1969)

Creator:

Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig

Style/Period:

Bauhaus; Modernist

Style/Period:

Modernist

Location:

site: Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain

City or Site:

Barcelona

Country:

Spain

Culture:

German

Date:

1929 (creation); 1986 (creation)

Material:

steel; glass; marble; travertine; onyx

Work Type:

buildings; exhibition buildings

Work Type:

exhibition building

Description:

It was not, however, until 1929 that the ideas of the earlier experimental period were finally realized in one of the most important buildings of the Modern Movement, the German (or Barcelona) Pavilion (destroyed; reconstructed 1986), Montjuïc, Barcelona. It was a last-minute addition to the German section of the Exposición Internacional in Barcelona in 1929 for which Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich (with whom he collaborated on exhibition projects) had been given overall design responsibility by the government in 1928. Here Mies van der Rohe used the open (decellurized) plan as an architectural analogy of the social and political openness to which the new German republic aspired. Space-defining elements were dissociated from the structural columns, planning was free and open, merging interior and exterior spaces: unbroken podium and roof planes were held apart by a regular grid of slender cruciform steel columns, giving a clear field for spatial design, using opaque, translucent and transparent walls freely disposed between the columns. These ideas were crucial to all his subsequent work. The rich materials of the space-defining walls, the reflecting pools-in one of which stands a sculpture by Georg Kolbe-and the furniture that he designed specifically for the pavilion (the well-known Barcelona chair, stools and table), all added to the architectonic qualities in a building of great poetic beauty. (Source: Grove Art Online; http://www.groveart.com/)